We were closing in on 4 months of living in a house overtaken by our latest business venture, making and selling natural deodorant. The living room was piled with boxes of materials and the kitchen was covered over in double boilers and all the other STUFF involved in making the products. Business had picked up rapidly which meant long hours of work and a neglected house to show for it.

Chaos prevailed everywhere. The most you could make in our kitchen was cereal, and I would hope you would plan on eating that standing up because the table had long since been buried as well.

In that space and that season, I got the crazy idea to listen to Sally and Sarah Clarkson’s Life-giving Home book. It’s all about creating special spaces and memories for our family that enrich everyone’s lives. It’s an idea I loved and aspire to, and was falling far short of just then especially. Continue Reading

Embarking on a new adventure is a wonderful, scary, exhilarating, happy and sad thing. I don’t mean it can be any one of these things. It’s all of them rolled into one, each surfacing at different moments throughout the process.

My friend, Mandy, is about to set off on a great new adventure. She and her husband of 20 years (Today! Happy Anniversary, Mandy and Steve!) are building an amazing farmhouse in the country.

They’re also watching their son’s career take off in the fashion industry of New York and LA, and dropping their daughter off at design school eight hours from home next week.

Everyone is growing and becoming and living life fully, and that’s incredible and exciting. It’s also a lot of change for a mama’s heart all at once.

With all of these big things in the works, they’ll all be saying goodbye in the next couple of weeks to what has been their home for the past 18 years. This is where two young people raised babies into adults, and they all weathered storms together as a family. It’s home, but sometimes we have to let some things go in order to reach for something better and I believe with all my heart that’s what’s happening here.

Still, it’s hard to say goodbye sometimes and that’s what pictures are for. :) This beautiful family met up with me at their home one last time this week to commemorate their time there together and capture it forever in photographs.Continue Reading

For far too long we have been promising Seven bunk beds. The problem is, as with so many of our ideas, our concept of “bunk beds” was a bit on the grand side. This meant complicated and time consuming and lots of moving pieces.

You see, we didn’t really mean “bunk beds.” We meant “built in loft bed with a clubhouse and stairs,” which would entail a custom build. It would also mean ripping up the old carpet the house came with and replacing it with a yet-to-be determined flooring choice. Oh and you know — time — between jobs and other house projects and trips and such. No big deal right?